Dunks are nice, but it still counts for two points if you lay it in. Jeff Reinking/Getty Images

Vince Carter is dunking again. If you didn't know he had ever stopped, it's probably because his determination to eliminate the shot from his repertoire forever, which he announced last week, lasted about as long as the sweet potato pie at Thanksgiving. Carter, the Toronto Raptors' gravity-defying forward, wasn't able to abstain for more than one game, and after he succumbed to temptation he explained that he had just been kidding when he said he was getting out of the slamming-and-jamming business.

It's more likely that Carter realized that without the dunk, he doesn't have a great deal to offer, at least as a basketball player. It's like Julia Roberts refusing to smile or Randy Johnson vowing never to throw another fastball. They can still do what they do, but why exactly would the rest of us want to watch?

Still, it's a shame that Carter didn't have more willpower, because he might have been on to something. Maybe other NBA stars would have followed his lead -- with college and high school players copying them, as always -- and not dunking would have become fashionable, like tattoos, headbands and that weird new way Latrell Sprewell wears his braids. It would be fascinating to see what would happen if the basketball world declared a moratorium on dunking, if only for a little while.

SportsCenter, for instance, might go dark. Since the show seems to consider it its solemn duty to show every slam that takes place in any gym in the country every night, it would surely need major re-tooling before it could go back on the air. When it did, its nightly top 10 video clips might actually include exotic plays rarely seen on the highlights, like players boxing out for a rebound or freeing a teammate with a solid screen.

Twenty percent of Dick Vitale's shtick would be obsolete. No "dipsy-do dunkaroo!" No "slaaam jaaam baaam!" at the top of his lungs, baby. No spasms of astonishment every time he witnesses a dunk, as if he'd never seen a 6-foot-8 kid from Syracuse throw one down before.

Children, deprived of their steady diet of dunks to imitate, might discover that the other 99.9 percent of the game is worth learning as well. Instead of seeing youngsters chinning themselves on bent rims on playgrounds around the country, we might see them running the pick-and-roll, the give-and-go, or maybe even -- and this may be too much to hope for -- practicing their free-throw shooting.

Sneaker companies might start signing clever little playmakers to endorse their shoes instead of rim-rattling dunkers. NBA teams might start drafting polished college seniors who know how to curl off a screen properly instead of raw high school freshman who know how to execute a jam with a 360-degree spin. American players might go into international competitions like the Olympics and not get flummoxed by efficient, well-drilled teams that realize they don't get extra points for degree of difficulty when they score a bucket.

Maybe the rest of us would eventually begin to realize that the dunk is nothing special anymore, that it's just another way to score two points. There would be no more scenes like the one NBA television analyst Doug Collins described to me years ago. Collins was talking to a group of youngsters at a clinic once, and as he described the fundamentals of shooting, his son Chris, a player at Duke at the time, demonstrated in the background. Chris sank shot after shot in a remarkable display of accuracy as Doug talked. When he was done, Doug asked the youngsters if they had any questions. The first kid to raise his hand had one for Chris: "Can you dunk?" Apparently we are as addicted to watching dunks as Vince Carter is to doing them. But unlike Carter, we could kick the habit any time we wanted to. Right?

Sports Illustrated senior writer Phil Taylor writes about a Hot Button topic every Monday on SI.com.